Heartache again for Northwest football in third straight Class 5A championship loss
It was an all too familiar script for the Northwest football team on Saturday.
For a third straight season the Grizzlies reached the Kansas Class 5A championship game with an undefeated record. And for the third straight season Northwest fell behind big early in the championship game, rallied back, and then suffered heartbreak in the fourth quarter.
The pain was evident in the faces of the 25 Northwest seniors who believed they were going to be the ones to deliver the school its first football state championship.
Instead, they left Carnie Smith Stadium on Saturday with their hearts broken like their predecessors following a 49-35 loss to Mill Valley. It was the second straight year Mill Valley (9-2) topped Northwest (10-1) in the 5A title game.
“We thought the third time was going to be the charm,” said Northwest senior Kaleb Coleman, who caught a 76-yard touchdown pass. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t.”
Northwest’s sideline was full of belief following the magic of Geremiah Moore, who somehow procured a 25-yard touchdown run out of a perilous situation on a fourth-and-8 play that looked like a sure sack. Instead, the 5-foot-9, 154-pound junior left Mill Valley’s defense grasping for air on a jaw-dropping touchdown run to bring Northwest level with Mill Valley at 35 points each with 8:21 remaining in the fourth quarter.
“Make something out of nothing, that’s what I do,” said Moore, who threw for 197 yards and rushed for 109 yards.
But for the second straight year, Northwest’s defense could not contain Mill Valley quarterback Cooper Marsh when it mattered the most.
Backed up in a second-and-17, Marsh connected with Jacob Hartman for a 40-yard strike. Four plays later, Marsh strolled into the end zone for the go-ahead touchdown with 5:08 remaining. Marsh finished with 255 passing yards on just seven completions with three touchdowns and added 134 rushing yards and three more touchdowns.
“You can’t say enough about Cooper,” Mill Valley coach Joel Applebee said. “He made some plays today that big-time players make. He’s a special, special kid and we’re going to miss him. He just rises to the occasion and he loves that atmosphere, that pressure of a state title game. He knows what to do.”
The stat sheet will show Northwest committed three turnovers on Saturday, but it won’t show the litany of mistakes — like bad snaps, missed blocks and overall lack of execution of the tiny details — that Northwest coach Steve Martin said ultimately proved to be his team’s downfall.
That was apparent on Northwest’s ensuing drive with a chance to tie the game again. After a timeout, Martin opted to go for a fourth-and-1 from Northwest’s own 29-yard line with the play calling for Moore to make a read to either keep it or hand the ball to Julius Bolden sprinting behind a wall of blockers on the right side.
What actually happened was the ball was snapped too high and Moore was unable to execute an effective fake to Bolden. Mill Valley’s defense was not fooled and wrestled Moore down in the backfield.
“When you play our schedule and you make mistakes, you can easily rebound from them,” Martin said. “When you play a team like Mill Valley, one of the blue bloods, and you make mistakes, they’re going to capitalize on them. We made way too many mistakes. We continually shot ourselves in the foot. Things we haven’t seen all year showed up to hurt us and it came back and got us when we couldn’t overcome those mistakes.”
Before Saturday, Northwest had not played one game where the score was separated by a touchdown or less in the fourth quarter this season. In fact, the Grizzlies had outscored their opponents 558-77.
Meanwhile, Mill Valley had been in wars with Derby, Bentonville (an Arkansas powerhouse), Gardner-Edgerton, De Soto and St. Thomas Aquinas.
“We’re going to come back and learn from this and we’re going to get back,” Martin said. “Every year we figure something out to attack. Now we’ve got to attack somewhere in our schedule and find a way to not let these mistakes come out in the big games. You don’t have to look for them when you’re playing the schedule we do, so you’ve got to be able to tweak it somehow.”
Bolden finished with 88 rushing yards for Northwest with a touchdown, while L.J. Phillips added 68 rushing yards and two scores and Trent Salisbury caught six balls for 93 yards. On defense, Todric McGee finished with a team-high 12 tackles, Zair Adkins had an interception and Nathan Hale came up with 1.5 sacks.
While this was the third straight appearance in the title game for Northwest, it came with the most to overcome.
The Grizzlies thought their season was over before it even began in late August when the Wichita Public Schools Board of Education voted to shut down the fall sports season. After nearly two weeks of protests, with Martin and his Northwest players out in front, the Board of Education overturned its decision and allowed football to be played.
“I’ll always remember what we went through just to get our season back,” said Northwest senior Zac Daher, an Army commit. “This wasn’t the outcome we wanted, but we went through so much just to get to this moment. We haven’t been in school. We’ve just been sitting at home. Football was the only thing we had. We grinded just to get back here, so I believe this is a historic team from Northwest.”
After the third straight title loss, Martin vowed Northwest would return and win a state title.
“We’re going to win one of these times,” Martin said. “Three years ago when we lost, someone told us we wouldn’t be back, and here we are back the last two years. We’ve just got to figure out how to win the last one.”
These Northwest seniors thought they were going to be the ones to figure out how to win the last one. While they left Saturday without the state title, Daher said that’s not how he’s choosing to look at the situation.
“The mistakes caught up with us in the end and we didn’t achieve our ultimate goal, but we all need to move forward and think about life,” Daher said. “You take a loss, you get knocked down, you get right back up. If you think about it that way, that’s why football is so great. It teaches us so many life lessons and that’s what we’ve got to remember now.”
| Northwest (10-1) | 0 | 14 | 14 | 7 | — | 35 |
| Mill Valley (9-2) | 14 | 7 | 14 | 14 | — | 49 |
MV—Teishus 91 pass from Marsh (Tennant kick)
MV—Marsh 1 run (Tennant kick)
NW—Phillips 36 run (Arndt kick)
MV—Marsh 3 run (Tennant kick)
NW—Phillips 1 run (Arndt kick)
NW—Coleman 76 pass from Moore (Arndt kick)
MV—Jones 50 pass from Marsh (Tennant kick)
MV—Wittenauer 27 run (Tennant kick)
NW—Bolden 1 run (Arndt kick)
NW—Moore 25 run (Arndt kick)
MV—Marsh 3 run (Tennant kick)
MV—Wittenauer 22 pass from Marsh (Tennant kick)
Rushing—Northwest, Moore 18-109, Bolden 19-88, Phillips 11-68, Ross 2-(-12); Mill Valley, Marsh 24-134, Wittenauer 21-65, Team 4-(-8).
Passing—Northwest, Moore 10-14-0-197, Ross 1-6-0-12; Mill Valley, Marsh 7-16-1-255.
Receiving—Northwest, Salisbury 6-93, Coleman 1-76, Martin 3-24, Bolden 0-10, Ross 1-6; Mill Valley, Reishus 1-91, Jones 3-90, Hartman 1-40, Wittenauer 1-22, Napoli 1-12.
This story was originally published November 28, 2020 at 3:49 PM.
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